Wingnuts Outraged: Obama Won't Spy On Muslims Like The Founders Wanted

Well, thank goodness the wingnutosphere has finally found an angle on this NSA story that makes them feel all special and put-upon! In a story that has absolutely nothing to do with the recent flap over PRISM, BLARNEY, and SMERSH, here is the headline -- from nominal business site and wingnut clearinghouse "Investor's Business Daily" -- that is finally giving islamophobes a chance to complain that we don't have ENOUGH domestic spying going on:   Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers. Of course, it's a complete bait and switch -- despite its breathless claim that "the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized," the story is not about the NSA's collection of phone and internet metadata. Rather, the editorial is upset that the FBI isn't randomly infiltrating places of worship:

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Shocking! When did Our America start granting special rights like "due process" and "free exercise of religion" to Muslims?

The piece complains that the review committee was put in place after an ACLU lawsuit alleged civil rights violations when the agency infiltrated Los Angles mosques for the purpose of, you know, just poking around, because surely those people must be up to something. IBD shades the FBI compliance with the Constitution as knuckling under to "pressure from Islamist groups," of course.

IBD also claims that, before Barack Obama declared "hands off my mosques," the FBI had "launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists -- inside mosques -- and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland." Not mentioned, of course, was the tendency of those stings to use informants who engineered terror plots out of whole cloth, rather than discovering actual homegrown terrorists.

Also, something something Boston, because again, houses of worship need to be infiltrated. Just as long as nobody checks the tax-exempt status of churches, because that would be fascism.

Oh, and that claim that the Sensitive Operations Review Committee exists because of pressure from Muslims? Yeah, that's bullshit too. 

[ IBD / DailyKos ]